It’s a horrifying view of what we have become and what we are becoming. There are horrors here on par with anything in the Middle Ages.

“I was the girl that nobody wanted,” Nancy Verhelst told Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper in the hours before her death.

“While my brothers were celebrated, I got a storage room above the garage as a bedroom. ‘If only you had been a boy’, my mother complained. I was tolerated, nothing more.”

Nancy Verhelst had hormone therapy in 2009, followed by a mastectomy and surgery to construct a penis in 2012. But “none of these operations worked as desired”.

“I was ready to celebrate my new birth,” she told the newspaper. “But when I looked in the mirror, I was disgusted with myself. My new breasts did not match my expectations and my new penis had symptoms of rejection. I do not want to be… a monster. “

What we’re dealing with here of course is perception. Like the anorexic or the bulimic, this is a case of someone with a distorted self-image as a result of psychological dysfunction.

Nancy was rejected by her mother. Instead of dealing with that problem, the establishment instead perversely decided to address the lack of a mother’s love by mutilating a grown woman into some warped creature that would only loosely resemble a man, but could never be a man, to meet the wishes of a mother who hated her.

And when Nancy continued suffering. There was another solution. Death.

Nathan, born Nancy, Verhelst, 44, was given legal euthanasia, most likely by lethal injection, on the grounds of “unbearable psychological suffering” on Monday afternoon.

Wim Distelmans, a cancer specialist who carried out the euthanasia, is the same doctor who late last year gave lethal injections to congenitally deaf twins who were frightened they were also going blind.

“The choice of Nathan Verhelst has nothing to do with fatigue of life,” said Dr Distelmans. “There are other factors that meant he was in a situation with incurable, unbearable suffering. Unbearable suffering for euthanasia can be both physical and psychological.

This is what we have become. This is the nightmare that our societies are turning into. This is our Brave New World.